Hi, I’ve hacked initfs of my n800 to show my name and email as you can see in this picture. I know that it is not a big deal, but it can be useful to avoid undesired changes/mistakes when you work in a team that has more than 1 n800.This post is not only to show, but to describe how to do this hack.

Download the image and flasher. (You can use the 0xffff if you prefer)

Unpack the image:

flasher -F <image name> -u

Mount the initfs.jffs2:

sudo modprobe mtdblock

sudo modprobe mtdram total_size=65536 erase_size=256

sudo modprobe jffs2

sudo modprobe loop

sudo dd if=/pathtoimage/initfs.jffs2 of=/dev/mtdblock0

mkdir /mnt/jffs2

sudo mount -t jffs2 /dev/mtdblock0 /mnt/jffs2

The /mnt/jfss2 directory is read only, so you need to create another dir and copy everything preserving the files:

mkdir $HOME/myinitfs

sudo tar pcf – -C /mnt/jffs2 . | tar xvf – -C $HOME/myinitfs

edit the $HOME/myinitfs/linuxrc using your preffered text editor. Look for “want_menu=0″ and add something like the text below just before it.

Another thing that I want to talk about is that I’m using the OS 2007 entire in a memory card (MMC) leaving free the main flash memory where I’m going to put Mamona. But this is a topic for another post…

6 Responses to “Hacking OS 2007 initfs”

on 20 Aug 2007 at 11:40 pm fanoush

You can do it also directly on the device without having linux PC with mtd modules and without downloading and extracting firmware, see initfs_flash script inside http://fanoush.wz.cz/maemo/#initfs

[...] thing that I did was to add the code below in the begin of boot() function in linuxrc of initfs (My last post explains how to edit and flash the initfs in your pc). load_mmc_modules root_dev=mmcblk0p2 [...]